I’ve been on this big kick talking about truthseeking in effective altruism. I started with vegan advocacy because it was the most legible, but now need to move on to the deeper problems. Unfortunately those problems are still not that legible, and I end up having to justify a lot of what I previously took as basic premises, and it’s all kind of stuck.
Sorry to be cynical here, but I suspect that the root of this problem isn’t so much disagreeing on basic premises, but rather, soldier mindsets.
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
It reminds me of when couples (in a romantic partnership) fight. You can have two sane, reasonable, rational people engaged in a dispute where they always seem to talk past each other and fail to make any progress whatsoever. But then when they wake up the next morning in a calm and co-regulated state, they somehow just smile at each other and resolve the dispute within minutes.
(Note: I haven’t followed the overarching conversation too closely. I’m somewhat confident in my prediction here but not super confident.)
Sorry to be cynical here, but I suspect that the root of this problem isn’t so much disagreeing on basic premises, but rather, soldier mindsets.
This excerpt from The Scout Mindset comes to mind:
It reminds me of when couples (in a romantic partnership) fight. You can have two sane, reasonable, rational people engaged in a dispute where they always seem to talk past each other and fail to make any progress whatsoever. But then when they wake up the next morning in a calm and co-regulated state, they somehow just smile at each other and resolve the dispute within minutes.
(Note: I haven’t followed the overarching conversation too closely. I’m somewhat confident in my prediction here but not super confident.)